Is Branding the New Way?

Everyone has a different path when it comes to internet marketing. I’ve done a lot in the 3 years. I’ve managed to take myself out of a job I hated and into a pretty decent six figure salary just through my online efforts. I could have done much better though if I had a more solid strategy.

I still get questions (emails and comments) about how one should go about internet marketing. I know from my own experience, it’s a scary world out there when you first start looking at trying to make some money online. As a marketer, you have to adapt quickly to change. The SERPS/Marketing world is dynamic and if you don’t evolve yourself, your boat will sink and you are going to drown. Just look at my own efforts:

2009: Web 2.0 “Bum Marketing”

Worked for about 6 months straight, building as many niche hubpage articles as possible. I ended up with something around 600 hubs. Managed to derrive my first “full time income” from my hub effort. Focus was on Adsense. This sort of marketing really took a nose dive early 2011 when Google declared open war on UGC (User Generated Content sites). This had huge ramifications, one which not only saw rankings for article directories/web 2.0’s tumble but also the tightening up of author rules. My feeling is that there are some legit platforms for user generated content, but on the whole, Google wants information to be disseminated from trusted sites (be the niche specific or general authority with some credence to them) not some joker writing bullshit hubs targeting adword longtail keywords. Really, what would you, as a reader, trust more if you typed in “How to Prevent Herpes”: a hubpage of dubious origin with no editorial monitoring or an article from health.com?

2010: Mini Sites

I spent part of 2009 building mini sites. 2010 I really ramped up my efforts though. In my heyday, I must have had close to 400 mini sites. The focus was on adsense. This model abruptly collapsed when a good 200 sites were deindexed May 2010. It was clear to me at that point that Google was moving in a different trend: brand and authority.

Mini sites really don’t offer too much in the way of user experience. There is nothing a large site (or “branded website”) can’t offer better than a mini site in terms of content, user engagement, or user experience. Many an authority site has started out as a mini-site, but if you don’t bother growing your best niches beyond the mini-site phase, you are losing out big time and you may lose out completely in the end.

2011+: Brand & Authority

The strategy this year has been to diversify my efforts into building big authority sites with an emphasis on “Brand.” The search engines have really been changing the past couple years — there has been a big shift to Brands having blanket authority. The heyday of the micro site is really coming to an end (it actually did a couple years ago!). The focus here has been affiliate selling, though I’m seriously looking at moving in to the direct advertizing market or offering legit services.

One model that I’m really delving into is to buy premium generic domains and work on building a brand on that domain. You get an amazing, top-notch generic keyword domain (helps brand yourself as a player in that niche and people REMEMBER that domain), you get instant “trust” from your readers and more opportunities for link building via networking (people trust you more because you own the generic domain), and you even get natural links because of the domain. This might not be fore everyone though, since many premium generics cost XX,XXX to XXX,XXX but it’s one (of many) strategy you can pursue if you want to focus your efforts on flagship sites. Note that you can still build a strong brand/authority site on a non generic domain or some wacky “brand” domain name too. I find it’s just way easier working with generic domains for a focused NICHE. If you want to go really broad though, a brand-type domain is better. (See my post about exact match domains).

So why all this talk about branding and authority? I know that not everyone can become a quote “Brand” in terms of say TripAdivsor or Amazon. But you can, with some foresight and (a lot of) elbow grease, brand yourself in a niche. Building a “brand” is more than just throwing up some information about a topic. A Brand is more than that. A brand resonates with the users, a brand does not necessary require Search Engine love to sustain itself (though by God it helps).

Now, if you want to successfully tackle a niche, you need to at least try mimicing some of the branding signals. Yes, that means reaching out with social media as a means to engage your readers on some level. That means finding out WHAT the readers are looking for and catering to their needs. That might mean you need to get yourself out of your basement, throw a shirt on (because god only knows how many internet marketers spend all their time locked up inside wearing only their underwear), and actually gets some on-the-ground information.

If you think rewriting someone else’s information is going to give you authority status in a niche, don’t waste your time. Building a real site these days can be a substantial investment of both time and money. You might need to actually hire real writers, real experts about topics, that sort of thing. You might be able to trick your readers (and Google) for a short time, but eventually you are going to be found out for the fraud you are if you go this route. Google (and other search engines) are getting very good at detecting so called “branding” signals. Can you mimic these with SEO? Yes, perhaps, but it’s getting harder and harder. At some point, it’s just so much damn EASIER to go the legit route and do the real thing. You certainly won’t sit around worrying about getting your site canned.

Just some food for thought for you newbies looking to make some money online. It’s still possible and the web is still a bit in that “wild west” phase, but slowly but surely civilization is moving in. Now is the time to get started — in 3-5 years from now, the landscape will be even more competitive. If you stake your claim now and develop a collection of authority sites, you could be laughing in a few years while sitting on a beach somewhere!

Comments 13

The signs are all there Ben, and getting more obvious by the day. Although I honestly don’t make much from pure branded sites, I could at least pay the bills with them if the SEO side goes belly up.

Getting away from purely search focused sites is a dream at the moment but not relying on search alone is definitely something everyone should think about as a long term strategy. Algo’s change constantly and there is never going to be any kind of guarantee when you rely on the big G alone.

I just wish it weren’t so 😉

Authority sites are doing better than ever and being given a lot more preference in the serps, which is good for me and not so good for others.

But mini sites are still working at the moment but the effort in making enough of them to earn well simply makes building a few large authority sites a better use of time anyway, and they should be around a lot longer too.

Good to hear from you Dave. I too don’t make much from branded authority sites (right now, I can say I probably only have 1 such site that you might say is branded somewhat. It makes a decent amount of money, but nothing crazy (2k a month maybe at most).

Mini sites (especially filled out ones) still make me a fair bit of coin. I don’t have good feelings though about the future sustainability of making money with a bunch of mini sites though. One can definetly build up the small sites into a larger scale, branded authority site, but it’s a lot of effort and it’s not possible to do so with every site — one has to pick and choose the battles.

My own personal strategy is to invest in premium generics and build legit businesses on those. It’s expensive as hell and a lot of work (work that requires more on the ground “marketing” over SEO), but I think the payoff will be there in a few years. That’s my own exit strategy anyways. With the SERPS changing so much, everyone is cooking up different paths.

Yep, the way we work is in a state of constant flux alright. Right now I’m losing a ton of traffic to those 3 ads at the top of the serp listings. We know they’re ads, but the general public doesn’t filter them out from the true organic listings, so they get clicked first. Means having a number 1 site for a KW ain’t what it used to be.

Even an authority branded site can’t compete with paid ads, so the choices get tougher. Do you play Google’s game and pay for your own ads? Expensive and can be fickle at best. Or look for other ways of getting traffic that converts.

Social media just doesn’t convert, at least not in my niches. There are possibly some niches that could, like personal growth, pandering to people’s egos or need to have a better public image etc. I’m testing those waters but monetizing is not so easy and getting the traffic to come will be a true test of ingenuity. We shall see.

Thanks for the post and update on where you are with all this, your right that being new and coming into this business its at the toughest time ever. I wouldn’t want to be walking into this now, that’s for sure.

Yep it’s pretty rough in the SERPS right now, especially in some niche spaces. You compete with deceitful google ads at the top 2-3 spots, followed by pictures, followed by perhaps a bunch of google local results. Google is really going into competition with their own users — a good case for an anti trust case.

I wish there was some easy answer other than “don’t rely on google.” The sad fact is that most of our money, as an internet marketer, comes from Google in some way or the other. One option I see is to put some serious effort into branding a good domain. If you can make money directly by selling services/direct advertizing and use the power of that brand to connect to people OUTSIDE of google, you may be able to get steady type in traffic outside of Google. Hard to do with a non-.com though. Right now, I’m actually going to be putting some serious efforts into the geodomain space. I’m going to see if I can make some serious money in a way that doesn’t just rely on Google. Risky though with all the google local stuff going on, but I think there’s potential there.

“Yep, the way we work is in a state of constant flux alright. Right now I’m losing a ton of traffic to those 3 ads at the top of the serp listings. We know they’re ads, but the general public doesn’t filter them out from the true organic listings, so they get clicked first. Means having a number 1 site for a KW ain’t what it used to be.

Even an authority branded site can’t compete with paid ads, so the choices get tougher. Do you play Google’s game and pay for your own ads? Expensive and can be fickle at best. Or look for other ways of getting traffic that converts.”

Serps says –

You could go for KW’s that don’t have the paid ads on top. There are thousands of them.

Hi Ben, I’ve been following your blog for quite some time, and this blog has been evolving into a brand name to me, I can find it whenever I want just typing the domain, dump big-G. 🙂

As for authority site, does it change the whole back linking strategy picture? Meaning webmasters should spend more time building concrete on-site contents with theme relevance and strong internal links, than heavily using tools such as Seo Link Robot to set up web 2.0/blog clusters and backlink those backlinks?

Recently, I am into “silo structure” theory which says that a site, even with zero backlink, can easily take top position with strong theme relevance and good site structure. Do you see this as a trend in the future? Or maybe if someone wants to survive in the long run, s/he should slap big G with self branding and loyal followers.

It seems that the more you move towards authority type of site, the more it looks like a real business that needs ad campaigns, customer relationship management plus lots of other stuffs, however, right now all I know about authority site is to constantly add more and more contents, even if some contents are not laser targeted and lack commercial intention, who knows, maybe they help to strengthen the site as a whole and benefit money pages in the long run. Gosh, I really hate taking a detour pretending I am not interested in making a sale.

Haha, if only it was I’d be getting some real traffic. I may have authority for that single term only!

I think there’s a difference between an “authority site” and a branded site. An authority site, by google standards, is a site that has enough backlinks and age (and other signals) that it’s given blanket rankings for a lot of terms. A BRANDED site is a site that makes more of a connection with the audience. Think big brands (coke, google, amazon). On a much smaller scale, you can brand yourself in a niche. Think SEOMoZ or Problogger. These websites/personalities have been more than just websites or authority sites. They are brands.

I think the progression is really Branded Site > Authority Site > Large Site > Micro Site in terms of trust/ranking.

The silo structure is fine for controlling the flow of a website and even on page SEO optimization. But toss away any sort of idea about taking top positions via strong site structure, theme relevance, and all that. That’s just pure crap, promoted by various make money online ebooks (one such being the latest one by that xfactor guy). I’m not saying siloing your site from ground up isn’t a good idea — it’s a valid design theme that can make organizing the flow of your site easier (and it’s better for SEO). But just because you put up a bunch of themed content, link it all together via a siloing structure doesn’t mean too much in terms of ranking your site.

Lots of Content + Age + Backlinks + Backlink Age + Keyword in Domain (bonus for exact match keyword) + on page SEO gives you your ranking, with MOST of the weight still being on the backlink part. Google is mixing things up a bit with on page seo + social signals + age now more than ever, but backlinks still count for most.

The way to go now is to, as you say, build customer relationship, network with other people in the niche, focus on user engagement, write compelling content that brings in links — that sort of stuff. I maintain that the days of rewriting some ezine articles, slapping that content on an exact domain, and getting some spam links is NOT the way to build sites now. There’s still money there (though it’s harder now), but you lose all your work as soon as you get a manual inspection — which will happen at some point.

Branding has always done well if you do a good job with it (i.e. Cracked / Problogger / RapGenius / etc.), it definitely takes more work though. The first two sites I ever made were branded (not really targeting any keywords) and both are still doing fairly deec at the moment.

With that said, right now there are still some relatively solid EMD’s to be purchased that will vanish within a few years. It’s just a matter of finding them… Coincidentally enough, I just bought a nice EMD within the past couple days.

Anyways, too bad CarInsuranceComparison.com isn’t still up for grabs…LOL

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About The Author

BenK has been around blogging in the SEO/Internet Marketing sphere since 2010 when he quit his job to pursue a self employed career of making a crazy online income with the dream of doing absolutely nothing to make good money.However, he soon found that dream was a lie; making an online living took a lot of hard work -- more work than he spent at his 9 to 5.In the 5 years he's been an Internet Marketer, he's:*made a full time income at nearly 20k a month, lost it, then work his way back up
*been banned from adsense twice, regained it, then banned again
*had hundreds of sites deindexed
*rebuilt everything from scratch in two years
*moved to Thailand where he now lives on a beach, living off of websites and blogging about internet marketing the RIGHT way.AuthorityIncome.com is his new blog where he shares his strategies, thoughts, and opinions on making a LONG TERM income through websites.